Cat by Marilyn Singer

 Marilyn Singer

Biographical Facts

Date of birth: October 3, 1948
Place of Birth: Bronx, New York
Education: "Children’s book author Marilyn Singer earned a BA in English from Queens College, City University of New York, and an MA in communications from New York University."( Poetry Foundation)

Poem Cat by Marilyn Singer 

 Analysis

This poem Cat by Marilyn Singer has characteristic as rhyme, alliteration, stanzas, lines, and more details like in other poems. Although its lines are great separate, it has only a big stanza because it has not space like breaks or different groups of stanzas. This stanza is made by fifteen lines, but the stanzas do not end the sentence at the end of each line. For example, the lines 1 to 8 do the sentence “I prefer warm fur, a perfect fire to lie beside, a cozy lap where I can nap, an empty chair when she's not there”(Singer). Besides, there is an alliteration for the repetition of the initial D consonant in the line “dislikes December”(Singer 14), a slat rhyme in the line 4 " to lie beside”(Singer) since the last two words share the same vowel sound but not of the consonants, and end rhymes in the lines 7- 8 and 13-14 due to they share the vowel /e/ and the constant /r/.  On the other hand, I infer two similar interpretations about the poem. First, I understand due to the title Cat who it is talking about. Clearly, It is about one cat which narrates the common things it does like as take a nap in heat place, even more in December when it is a cold season, as Singer wrote: “No cat I remember/ dislike December / inside.” (13-15). This is similar when we frequently say “I can not remember any one who dislike that” if it is the author’s intention, I like the personification that he gives to the cat. Second, I think the narrator of the poem is a person who compared the human whit the cats because in a cold season, who does not like naps, warm places, one cozy lap like cats want.

Work Cited 

Singer, Marilyn. Cat. from Turtle in July. Reprinted by permission of Marilyn Singer. Web Poetry Fundation.https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/147301/cat-5b3ba51bf2687. Accessed 17 November 2020.